(Turns out, in South Korea, if you do what our CIA and FBI did in 2016 to spy on and try to derail opposition candidates in an election… you go to JAIL. Gee… I wonder if that will happen here in the Shining City on the Hill?)

The Seoul Central District Court sentenced on Wednesday former chief of the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS), Nam Jae-joon, to a three-and-a-half-year jail term for abusing power, Yonhap reported.

Nam was accused of attempts to hinder the investigation into political manipulations spearheaded by the NIS against the opponents of then-South Korean president Park Geun-hye, who was impeached following a political scandal in December 2016, the Yonhap news agency reported.

Thus, prosecutors insisted that Nam’s agency tried to sway public opinion in favor of Park’s government through cyberoperations on the Internet, the news outlet specified…

As Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign.

The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish.

Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC:

that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the Trump campaign, which he was running right out of CIA headquarters.

The CIA was furious about the leak, but never denied the BBC’s story. To Congress earlier this year, Brennan acknowledged the existence of the group, but cast his role in it as the mere conduit of tips about Trump-Russia collusion:

“It was well beyond my mandate as director of CIA to follow on any of those leads that involved U.S. persons. But I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the bureau.”

But if his role had truly been passive, the “inter-agency taskforce” wouldn’t have been meeting at CIA headquarters. By keeping its discussions at Langley, Brennan could keep his finger wedged in the pie. Both before and after the FBI’s official probe began in late July 2016, Brennan was bringing together into the same room at CIA headquarters a cast of Trump haters across the Obama administration whose activities he could direct – from Peter Strzok, the FBI liaison to Brennan, to the doltish Jim Clapper, Brennan’s errand boy, to an assortment of Brennan’s buddies at the Treasury Department, Justice Department, and White House.

The bogus tip from Estonia led the group into its first cock-up: sending FBI agents to sniff around the computer server connected to Trump Tower.After that effort flopped, Brennan’s group had to go back to the drawing board (on the electronic intelligence front, it had already hatched plans for national security letters and FISA warrants).

The naming of Stefan Halper as the individual sent by the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election campaign has further inflamed the political warfare raging within the US state apparatus and political establishment. Halper is a long-time CIA asset with deep ties to US and British intelligence.

Published reports that the FBI had used a confidential informant to gather information on the Trump campaign led US President Donald Trump to announce via Twitter on Sunday, “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes, and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

Repeating his denunciation of the year-old probe by Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion by the Trump campaign, as a “witch hunt,” Trump declared last week that the report of FBI spying on his campaign was a political scandal “bigger than Watergate.”…

There are still many unanswered questions, but the evidence that now is part of the public record removes any doubt that British and US Intelligence services collaborated in a devious and fabricated scheme to portray the Trump campaign as intent on collaborating with Russia. The evidence was planted and cleverly fabricated. It was done through highly classified intelligence channels, which created a paper trail and provided prima facie “evidence” that individuals with tenuous ties to the Trump campaign where seeking meetings with Russian officials. What was not reported, however, was the fact that the original impetus for those reporting on those communications originated with an individual who appears to be an MI-6 intelligence asset. His name is Joseph Mifsud and I believe that evidence ultimately will establish that he was directed to contact and then feed incriminating information to George Papadopoulos. That information became the foundation of creating a counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump and his campaign.

First a word about Joseph Mifsud. He is currently missing. But the public record on him strongly suggests that he was working as an intelligence asset of the United Kingdom’s MI-6. Elizabeth Vos at Disobedient Media provides an excellent review of Mifsud and his links to British intel (her article appears to have been taken down, but it is solid and I saved a copy):

After listening to a month’s worth of the complicit media yelling their outrage at Sean Spicer, Devin Nunes, Judge Napolitano, Donald Trump and all the other “conspiracy theorists” (myself included) who dared suggest it was even slightly possible that British intelligence agencies used the 5 Eyes program to spy on the Trump campaign staff in the lead-up to the election and then share that information with the Obama administration (who at the time was working as a surrogate for the Hillary team) today we have confirmation that, yes, GCHQ and other British intel services did in fact spy on team Trump and share the information they collected with Obama. And it predates the “Russian hacking” bull crap.

The narrative being sculpted is that the Brits were simply assisting in the ongoing investigation into the “Russian hacking” story but the truth is, their intel dates back to late 2015… long before the “Russian hacking” narrative.

The UK government has quietly passed new legislation that exempts GCHQ, police, and other intelligence officers from prosecution for hacking into computers and mobile phones.

While major or controversial legislative changes usually go through normal parliamentary process (i.e. democratic debate) before being passed into law, in this case an amendment to the Computer Misuse Act was snuck in under the radar as secondary legislation. According to Privacy International, “It appears no regulators, commissioners responsible for overseeing the intelligence agencies, the Information Commissioner’s Office, industry, NGOs or the public were notified or consulted about the proposed legislative changes… There was no public debate.”

Privacy International also suggests that the change to the law was in direct response to a complaint that it filed last year. In May 2014, Privacy International and seven communications providers filed a complaint with the UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), asserting that GCHQ’s hacking activities were unlawful under the Computer Misuse Act.